Exhibition recreates Arctic in National Maritime Museum

United Visual Artists --
famous for providing stage visuals to Massive Attack and Chemical
Brothers -- have teamed up with the National Maritime Museum (NMM)
to create an enormous exhibition that will give visitors a taste of
what it's like to travel to the Arctic.

The piece -- called High Arctic -- was inspired by a visit to the Arctic by UVA's
co-founder Matt Clark, after venturing with the arts and climate
science foundation Cape Farewell. Cape Farewell's aim is to inspire
a cultural response to the climate challenge and engage artists as
catalysts to provoke cultural shift towards a more sustainable
society.

There he spent three weeks sailing aboard The Noorderlicht, a
100-year old Dutch Schooner alongside scientists, poets, musicians
and polar bears. Climate scientists measured the likes of sea
temperature, salinity and acidity of the water, while artists were
there to be inspired by magnificent landscape.

Clark told Wired.couk: "Walking across these glaciers was the
most magical moment for me. When I was standing on one of them, one
of the scientists said: 'In 50 years' time, these won't be here'.
It is this beauty, scale and fragility and a sense of loss which we
are trying to embody in this exhibition."

The exhibition takes place in a brand new 40 by 17 metre room in
the National Maritime Museum. The room is shaped by three thousand
white pillars at varying heights (from four metres to a few
inches), designed to echo the shapes of the glaciers of the Arctic.
The majority of these "glaciers" will have individual names based
on the names of the more than 2,500 glaciers on Svalbard.

The highly stylised model of the Arctic combines the skills of
architectural lighting designer, art code, animation, sound design
and poetry. The jutting columns of "ice" -- which will actually be
made out of MDF or a specially-coated polystyrene -- had their
scale based on Lego
models because, as team member Ben Kreukniet explains,
"Lego is awesome". He added: "So we made these columns exactly 10
times the size of a pillar of [square, single layer] Lego
blocks."

These are built up into around 65 little islands to form an
overall archipelago. Kreukniet adds: "We wanted it to be an
abstraction of the environment rather than literal."

The journey is narrated by an epic, fragmented poem -- by fellow Nick Drake,
who travelled to Svalbard with Clark -- that is laced into the
islands through a network of 100 speakers. Clark explains:
"He's using actual quotes from early explorers, early whalers,
racing to get to North Pole."